1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a service method of a rental storage and a rental storage system, and more particularly to a service method of a rental storage and a rental storage system, which may propose reasonable contract conditions conforming to the actual usage of storages by the storage users from the storage provider side at the time of renting storages such as disk subsystems to users in order to reduce costs applied to the storage users.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The amount of information traffic, represented by the explosive spread of internet communication, used by users in the modern computer environment in recent year has been significantly increased, and is still increasing. The amount of data stored in the storage thereby is increasing accordingly, resulting in the increase of management cost of the growing accumulated data. The retrenchment of management cost is thus one of mandatory problems.
Under the context as have been described above, a noticeable service is emerging, as a new aspect of usage of storage represented by the disk subsystem by a storage service provider (referred to as SSP herein below), for providing rental storages for users. Users had to provide by themselves any storage to store data, by for example purchasing. The users were responsible to the maintenance of storage. On the other hand, when using the rental service of storage space provided by the SSP, users do not need to prepare any storage devices, but do hire some storage space at the SSP site at a charge, according to the contract made. As a result users will be released from the burden of maintenance of storages or extension project, thereby will have less responsibility of administration. However, when using such services, although users have not to pay for purchasing any hardware resources for the storages, users will have to pay much, in correspondence with the amount of data if they use more, since in most cases the SSP charges users for the used amount of data.
In conventional management method of data in most popular operating systems such as Unix, it is well known that the actual usage of data may be recognized by the count of issued commands. In some operating systems used in the personal computers, the history of the usage of data may be displayed.
Now referring to FIG. 34, there is shown a typical example of display of usage of storage in the past according to the Prior Art.
FIG. 34 is a schematic chart illustratively indicative of displaying the usage of data record in accordance with the Prior Art.
In the Prior Art, the statistical summary of the past usage of data is displayed, however the estimation of usage of data in the figure based on the past usage of data has not been implemented.
As another example of Prior Art, a performance estimation can be cited, which performs an estimation with respect to a fluctuating environment. This estimation of performance is used when reconfiguring a computer system, without and before actually rearranging the components. An exemplary performance estimation technique of the Prior Art is disclosed for example in the Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 324358/1993.
The Prior Art cited above describes a rental service of storage as a method for reducing the burden of data administration by the users. When using this service, users will be charged according to the usage of data, so that the users will need to acknowledge the current usage status. Thus this arises a problem of increasing the burden of user, resulting in the increased management cost.
The data management method of operating systems in accordance with the Prior Art allows monitoring the history of data usage in the past, however the estimation of future data usage based thereon is not described. The users therefore may recognize the current and past data usage while the estimation of data usage in the future will be neither disclosed nor solved, the users thus will have a problem of increased burden of data management, because of increased management cost of data usage caused by monitoring the fluctuating amount of data usage all the time in order to have an opportunity of considering the addition of storage capacity if needed. This may not solve the problem of increased cost.
Technology disclosed in the Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 324358/1993 is embodied by a performance estimation apparatus for estimating the change of performance due to the fluctuation of jobs fed to the computer system and the alteration of system configuration. However this technology does not state about the estimation of the changing usage of data.
The SSP that provides rental storages to the users, have required to manage a huge amount of data for the users and therefore the burden of administration and the management cost of storage have been considerable.